Why might gods be benevolent towards humanity?

I see your point, but do you know what justification Hindus use for the lack of Divine Intervention in today's affairs? Any real life religion needs some sort of explanation as to why their god(s) scaled back direct involvement.

That said, I agree that Hinduism might be a better model for this idea if it lacks the divine-human conflict that Judaism and Christianity do.

Maybe the gods see humans like how humans see animals or even children.

"Oh, who brought a nice sacrifice? You! You brought a nice sacrifice! Here you go, good boy, have a miracle!"

Note for VERY BROAD strokes: Perhaps the gods care about mortals because they like helping people out?

A lot of pagan deities have a pretty basic "give-and-take" relationship with mortals, as mentioned in "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry's" series about how to get polytheism right. We give the gods prayers and offerings in the correct manner, and they at least TRY to respond. That was basically expected with offerings, and deviations usually meant something was WRONG or that the deity was UNUSUAL (or more likely preoccupied). A number of pagan gods are very human-like in thinking, and to that logic, it would be worrying if you gave a deity their usual sacrifice/prayers and they DIDN'T answer.

Even the Olympian gods (who often get flanderized into "jerkasses who don't care about mortals AT ALL") actually paid a LOT of attention to their worshipers in everyday life, and tried to help them out. It is stated numerous times that exceptionally good sacrifices in the Iliad or Odyssey "made Deity's heart glad," and the prayers from dying demigod soldiers on both the Trojans' and Greeks' sides are very much upsetting to their parents, specifically because they normally help their children, but there are way too many prayers at once from scattered individuals, and too much battlefield chaos for a single god to wade through.

Also, some people seem to be falling into the pitfalls of "ALL GODS are omnipotent / omniscient," when that was not nearly the case for everyone. Gods' powers in most pagan pantheons don't usually "degrade" from one generation to another. One god may be more powerful than another, but their FUNCTIONS could well be different.

The OP's parent-deity wouldn't have to be all-powerful or omniscient to birth other gods that are "less powerful but still superhuman;" they could be a god who ascended to another plane, or became part of nature itself, and thus can no longer "answer" people in the way that they used to.

Edited by Sharysa on Feb 26th 2022 at 4:36:52 AM

Interestingly enough, that’s actually really similar to how the gods in the setting I’m working on operate.

Most of the current gods came from the body of an original creator god who also created humanity out of clay. Because of this, the gods actually view themselves as siblings to humanity since they technically came from the same source.

They taught humanity how to take care of themselves so that they could ensure nature is running smoothly without cosmic interference. For this, humanity gives back to the gods with offerings befitting the job of each god.

It’s very much a mutually beneficial relationship due to the unusual way these gods view their mortal neighbors.

Oh, I don't think I made my point clear enough. A beneficial relationship with spirits/gods IS NOT UNUSUAL in real life, and your mythos is very sound in logic, but I'm guessing you had to ask because a lot of modern-day people (especially in Western cultures) think that gods feeling grateful is strange. This could be for a lot of reasons, but usually it's because said people often think that pagan gods must be omniscient and all-powerful like the Christian God, and they must not REALLY need our help (in stark contrast to actual pagan pantheons), or they're jerkasses who leech off mortals with no responsibilities in return.

"Gratitude" and "social debts" are not always BAD THINGS, especially not to premodern societies that depended on it (I give my neighbor vegetables, so they give me a couple of fleeces from their sheep). Same with deities, even if you're just motivated by "hi, I'm your new follower, and I brought breakfast!" (give the gods food, "get" a relationship), or "because spirits need to eat" (a well-nourished god has energy to help you) or "so they don't GET MAD" (which once got an awesome Twitter meme about how Filipino and Irish traditions both treat The Fair Folk as Otherworldly mafia dons, because you don't give them gifts to make friends, unless the "friendship" is how the spirits go "you pay your dues, so I won't put a hit on you.")

If you want to get into my very rusty psychology/anthropology knowledge, your religion seems especially primed to be a spiritual gift-economy. 1) The gods asked for military aid from mortals in a war, 2) they delivered on that help, so 3) the gods show gratitude by answering prayers and giving mortals protection from their surviving enemies. I wouldn't be surprised if heroes' names and exploits were invoked as reminders, or if mortals tell the gods that "we are the children of your comrades-in-arms."

Speaking of "children," I've noticed disparaging terms where humans are called "little," "children," and "pets," when that was ALSO not the case in a lot of pagan pantheons (and still isn't set in stone for modern pagans). Humans are less powerful than gods, and we don't enjoy dying, but condescending to humans seems like risky business when they're feeding you and socializing with you.

Many pagans consider themselves SERVANTS to deities, if anything. Real-life nobles DID often think commoners were lower than them, but it wasn't as openly hostile as Game of Thrones portrays; again, most people forget that nobles had responsibilities, and there were rules against mistreating their people. Were they ignored? Yeah, but there were also consequences. Like rebellions, or fines, or how your reputation gets dragged through the mud by your canny rival to prove you're "not a REAL noble," so they can take your tenants (and probably your castle). A less status-based relationship is "subspecies and other subspecies." Demigods are all over the place, often founding a royal dynasty, or explaining why certain people have magical powers, so we aren't quite the same, but continued contact plus the gods' longer lives means that we also don't drift TOO FAR apart.

The insults sound like something the evil gods would use as jabs: "They didn't need help, they needed guard dogs they could sic on us!" or "You can't stand when your precious little children get hurt, don't you?"

Although that "insignificant mortals" thinking would well be a neutral mindset from the Nature Spirits-turned-gods, who haven't gotten the hang of "how people (and humanoid gods) think." But if your MAIN gods are in war—with weapons that need crafting, logistics that need record-keeping, and medical care that needs a lot of doctors and nurses (because many pagan gods can get injured, even if they're very hard to kill)—then that's a human-minded chain of actions, and they wouldn't call other combatants "children" unless a specific god is known for running their mouth, or the humans are actually acting immature.

Edited by Sharysa on Feb 28th 2022 at 10:29:28 AM

Oh, I see! You seem very knowledgeable on this particular subject.

The facts you posit are things I didn’t actually consider about real word pantheons before making this one for my setting, even though now that you state in these terms they seem relatively obvious and are things I really should have thought about.

As an aside, I am very glad that the current cosmology I have established is sound and logical!

I had this idea for a while, which is basically "there's a big threat from other, more powerful beings so the "gods", which are not all-powerful, need to ally with humans for a time". Though this idea spun off of a strange videogame, and said videogame is known for being... not that good.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure where to go with it. Not sure if it's even a good idea. And I don't think I can post here anymore because I don't know what I'm really talking about and I've only been "writing" for 2 years- DISCLAIMER ENDED.

To put it a bit more explicitly, a lot of non-christian faiths treated gods more like either facts of nature or overlords.

that is, you either have a ritual you do because to your best of your knowledge, it *works*, or you do it because a satisfied god might not help you, but it also won't hurt you. In particular the former case, remember that for much of history the only means of information transfer was word-of-mouth. Traditions thus are essentially knowledge of previous generations passed on. If doing a sacrifice to your harvest god led to a year of great yields, then it's logical to try again the next year and the next. After all, surely you did *something* right to get a great harvest. It's akin to trying to solve a complicated puzzle. Doing the right rituals in the right situations to the right gods is thus their best means of achieving a desired goal.

The other side of it is that your overlord might not care about you specifically, but if they aren't hostile that's already great. The same logic applies to gods: you don't want to piss them off, even if they're never going to be your friends. Their power to ruin your day is immeasurable.

For example the ancient greek gods, sacrificing to Ares or Hades mostly involved not pissing them off, whereas in the case of Zeus was more a "please throw us some good winds". Much like we can give a treat to a dog (it costs us basically no effort but helps the dog greatly), so can gods effortlessly help mortals.

I think that runs into the issue that, if humans are so powerful that they can help gods, then what exactly makes the gods gods? It's usually much more common that humans are simply chosen of the gods as their racehorse of choice, or they like the symbolism.

Well, that's... something that needs to be worked on. A possible explanation to how powerful humans have become is that technology and magic have advanced so much in so little time that the gods just don't know what's going on and can't adapt fast enough.

Edited by ARandomPage on Mar 2nd 2022 at 11:31:15 PM

Long story short, I sound knowledgeable because I am a pagan, PLUS I read lots of mythology. I actually had to cut some bits of my post out about how your basic myth sounds like a reversal of Irish mythology—instead of mortals fighting AGAINST the gods and forcing them to move underground into the fairy-mounds, your story's humans fight ALONGSIDE them, agree to worship them as their end of the deal, and gain the ire of the evil gods.

A Random Page: Perhaps humanity's "power" is their sheer numbers? A given pagan gods may be an extremely powerful One-Man Army, but how big is an army? A hundred well-trained people? A thousand? Ten thousand "average" but determined humans? Many pagan gods EVENTUALLY need to eat, sleep, and recover from wounds, no matter how well they do on the battlefield.

In Greek mythology, the gods overthrew their cruel father and the other Titans (basically a clan of Nature Spirits writ large), to establish a new rule under Zeus. Meanwhile, Norse mythology has an Order Versus Chaos version of the "gods versus nature-spirits" battle, where the gods represent many human-oriented concepts and will eventually need humanity's help to fight against the jotunn/giants during Ragnarok.

Pagan pantheons often have limits to their superhuman abilities, and it is not rare AT ALL to find gods suffering under a bad destiny, or the effects of of nature itself, or wrathful nature-spirits. (DISCLAIMER, VERY BROAD BRUSH STROKES based off of the two pantheons I mentioned above. Take this with a grain of salt.)

As noted by Our Gods Are Different, the only real common points for gods across most pantheons are that MOST OF THEM can't die of old age, MOST OF THEM prefer to be worshiped, and MOST OF THEM have magical abilities of varying power.

Edited by Sharysa on Mar 3rd 2022 at 8:59:37 AM

Really the key is worship. A god is any being or thing that supposedly has some sort of authority and is worshipped. Apart from that, gods can be different in any way. Immortality and power are more cultural associations.

The Abrahamic God (Almighty Time Abyss), Greek gods (immortal), and Norse gods (mortal) are all very different.

There is also the "Artificial Gods" (aka "Gods created by gods") that would be more beneficial to Humanity since to them, "Faith = Maintenance" in order to keep functioning and keep the gears of reality turning once their creators have long faded into oblivion and obscurity eons ago from the ever-changing concept of religion in the human race.

And in contrast to a living god, an "artificial god" would definitely be much more fair and neutral in its judgment than something with bias would be able to do.

Do you have an example from real religions of an "artificial" god? Or did you make up that concept?

Why would the original gods fade into oblivion? They would lose divine status if no longer worshipped, but that would not mean that the beings holding that status would be destroyed.

Edited by shiro_okami on Mar 5th 2022 at 8:48:50 AM

1. (I am not walking into that theological minefield again. So I will not just hand out the answer on that one. But I can say this: There has been at least 18,000 of them created through the history of mankind, by mankind.)

2. Oh really?

For example, when you think of "Thor", what is the first image of him that comes to mind?

Edited by TitanJump on Mar 5th 2022 at 2:57:22 PM

Guy with hammer who makes thunder.

I thought you said "artificial" gods were created by other gods, not humans?

Edited by shiro_okami on Mar 5th 2022 at 11:06:48 AM

The same way I consider the question of "What came first, the Chicken or the Egg?"

A "True God" is one that exists independent on Humanity to keep it alive through faith and memory.

Simple put, independent from Mankind and unknown to Mankind.

One that is aware of us (the Human Race) but we are not aware off ourselves.

One that exists by 'itself and will be just fine long after the last human is gone together with the artificial gods it created through its history as a creative species.

Mankind are the Gods of the Artificial Gods as it alone created them all.

See the connection there?

And the Artificial Gods has already outlived its original creators long ago...

...

(Personal definition. Nothing else.)

Edited by TitanJump on Mar 5th 2022 at 5:15:23 PM

So it's a play on words.

Mortal humans are the "gods" (creators) of The Ageless "artificial" gods (worshipped beings) who continue to exist after their "gods" have died.

It makes sense with that explanation. Like the gods in The Sandman or Noragami.

Edited by shiro_okami on Mar 5th 2022 at 11:39:24 AM

You got it.